Who Killed Canadian History

Canadian History 11 Ms. Ripley 1

Who Killed Canadian History? Written by J.L. Granatstein

Jack Granatstein's hypothesis is as follows:

Canada must be one of the few nations in the world, certainly one of the few Western industrialized states, that does not make an effort to teach its history positively and thoroughly to its young people. It must be one of the political entities to overlook its own cultural tradition, the European civilization on which our nation is founded, on the grounds that they would systematically discriminate against those who come from other cultures. The effects of these policies on a generation of students are all around us.

History is important, I believe, because it is the way a nation, a people, and an individual learn who they are, where they came from, and how and why their world has turned out the way it has. We do not simply exist in the contemporary world. We have a past, if only we would try to grapple with it. History teaches us a sense of change over time. History is memory, inspiration, and commonality-- and a nation without memory is every bit as adrift as an amnesiac wandering the streets. History matters, and we forget this truth at our peril.

If we have no past, then surely it must follow that we have no future. We do have a history, a proud history of working together to accomplish great things and to overcome enormous obstacles-- if only we can be persuaded to study it, to learn from it, and to draw strength from it to meet our current and our future challenges. (p. xviii)

Indeed, it sometimes seems that Canadians have deliberately deconstructed their past, sacrificing it for the good of a mythical present. Confederation was a scheme by railway investors to protect their profits. The Riel rebellions were attempts to thwart efforts to crush the idyllic civilizations of native peoples under the weight of technology and speculators. If Canada participated in two world wars, it should not have, because Canadians are peacekeepers by nature.

Many see a nation that today sees itself as bilingual, multicultural, pacifist, and committed to social justice. (p. 4) These are not evil national goals, to be sure, though they scarcely represent the Canada most Canadians know. Even though each generation always writes its own history, the past is not supposed to be twisted completely out of shape to serve present ends. To do so mocks Canadian History 11 Ms. Ripley 2 the dead and makes fools of the living; it reduces the past to a mere perspective on the present; and it imprisons history in a cage of consciously constructed quasi-fabrications. As Germans,

Japanese, and Russians surely know, nations have to overcome their histories. Canada, thank heavens, has a relatively benign history, but, where we consider it at all, we struggle against the past as if our forebears had committed atrocities and innumerable evils, and regularly practiced genocidal behaviour. The task of the current generation is to build on the past, to understand it, and triumph over it. If we cannot, the fault is not in what happened one, two, or three centuries ago, but in ourselves.

History is important because it helps people know themselves. It tells them who they were and who they are; it is the collective memory of humanity that situates them in their time and place; and it provides newcomers with some understanding of the society in which they have chosen to live. (p. 4 and 5)

Canadians have not tried to understand their past, so it should come as no surprise that they know little about it. Survey after survey has proven this ignorance beyond dispute. (p.6) The progressive theories of education they espouse are child-centred rather than knowledge-based.

The aim is to teach problem solving and critical thinking, not content. Facts are unimportant and can always be looked up on the Internet. Those who think that content is important are slavish practitioners of old-fashioned "rote learning." The result is a generation of students who are totally ignorant of anything not beamed into their brains via TV, movies, comic books, and the Internet.

Very few television programs are devoted to the history of Canada- though the advent of a history channel may increase the quantity- and those that are produced are often biased in the extreme.

A CBC series such as The Valour and the Horror, which pretended to be a dramatized documentary about Canadian participation in the Second World War, created a furor, largely because it had no context. Only federal agencies fundamentally unaware of history could have funded such programming. Worse yet, the media rallied as one to defend the writers-producers, Canadian History 11 Ms. Ripley 3 the McKenna brothers, against the protests from veterans and parliamentarians. Freedom of speech was one of the goals these veterans had fought to preserve, and few ever expected it to be used against their courageous efforts in such a way. The veterans, at least knew that their history was being taken away from them.

That Canada seems to be a nation without a past, without roots, must surprise those who listen to what their children tell them about school. They soon discover that there is little to distinguish schoolyard or teenage culture in Canada from the American culture that dominates the television screen.

(p.14-15)

Ottawa's policy toward immigrants’ aims to encourage slow integration and to preserve the cultural mosaic in a nation is marked by tolerance and goodwill. Is it sound when no effort, other than the citizenship test, is made to teach newcomers that Canada is a nation with a past, with traditions, with a history? No one should be surprised, therefore, that the Croatians defense minister is a Canadian who returned "home" when the civil war erupted in Yugoslavia. No one should find it unusual that Serbian and Croatian Canadians, born in Canada, returned "home" to fight against the boy they went to high school with. Unthinking Canadians complacently assumed that our schools and our society had turned them all into good, bland, peace-loving Canadians, (p.

16 and 17)

"Historians," Soviet general secretary Nikita Khrushchev once said, "are dangerous people.

They are capable of upsetting everything." The Russian leader understood that history matters because it is concerned with real people and with the way human lives have changed, for better or worse, over time.

The teaching of history is important because knowledge of the past is the prerequisite of political intelligence. Without history, we as a nation cannot undertake any rational into the politic, social, or moral issues of our society. And without historical knowledge and inquiry, we cannot achieve the informed citizenship that is essential for effective participation in a democracy. (p.21) Canadian History 11 Ms. Ripley 4

I find the absence of crucial words [in a section on the October Crisis of 1970 from the most widely used text] extremely interesting. Nowhere do we read that the FLQ is a group terrorists that used bombs that killed innocent people, that [kidnapped English trade commissioner James] Cross and [Quebec labour minister Pierre] Laporte were hostages. Laporte is not assassinated, he is simply found dead (did he get a heart attack?). There is no blackmail, no turmoil in Montreal. The population is not scared. Nobody is guilty, although the members of the FLQ are imprisoned and exiled? All of them, even the ones that did not take part in the abduction and assassination? (p. 36)